Happy Valentine's Day

The students were given an option to hand out Valentine's Day cards for tomorrow. The only expectation was that if they give one out, they must give one to every student in the classroom.

Because I cannot give out the students names online, and we have been practicing taking ownership and responsibility for our own actions and learning, I am hoping that the students know the names of their peers in the class, or took the initiative to write everyone's names down themselves. If for some reason, you cannot think of a student's name why not try one of the following:

1. Visualize (like we do in reading) the desk layout and where everyone sits in the class.

2. Sign your own name on (25) of the cards in the "from" section and which ever name you have forgotten, leave the "to" section blank and write it down in the morning.

3. Can you think of your own strategy?

Hope this helps! :)

Happy Valentine's Day

SCIENCE FAIR

At the end of the day on Thursday I gave all the students Science packages back to them. Their task over the weekend is to think about the purpose of their Science experiment. I had Mr. Jones help me to look over their "Questions" and our concern was that they were either too easy (not a lot of thinking involved) or their questions had no purpose to them.

There was one girl in our class who had a good idea and her big question was, "Which popcorn kernels will pop more, no-name or name brand?" This is an experiment comparing two things and it has a good purpose because you will know which popcorn will give you your moneys worth. Another good one was testing the effect of pop with chicken bones. Which could be compared to your teeth. This experiment also leads to research. The experiments should lead to further research and should also be backed up with research.

The planner message for science fair was "poster board." Please do not start on the poster board yet! Just think about getting one and if you have one, you can think about the layout. The students can start creating their sub-headings because that will be the same for everyone. They can create fancy subheading (Big Question, Hypothesis, Procedure, Materials, Observation, Conclusion, Sources of Error, Further investigation.) Please remember the poster board had to be able to stand up. Please refer to the rules again if any questions. Do not start gluing anything yet.

If you have any questions can you please post it on the blog under comments. I will try my best to answer any questions on here, and then we can all view the questions and comments.

Thank you.

Have a great rest of your weekend.

SCIENCE FAIR and BOOK CLUB

Science Fair:

As I am sure you know, all of the grade 4's are doing Science Fair this year. We are having the school Science Fair on March 7th all day. There will be a "parent's welcome" time from 1:30-2:30. We then ask that you help your child take home their experiment. We will also have our own class science fair on Monday March 5th in the afternoon.

So far I have only asked that the students read the package with you. (This went home on Monday) Please review the rules and expectations, such as the projects should be based on an experiment and not be models (ie. no volcanoes or solar system models etc.)

I will be demonstrating some experiments with the students in class and be going over the process for an experiment, but other than that, this is an "at home" project. As parents, you are invited to be involved to assist your child with their experiment, but encourage your child to be the one to go through the scientific process by making predictions and conclusions on their own. You can assist with explaining scientific language, helping them figure out variables to use or not and how to control the experiments etc.

Tonight's assignment was that they research an experiment that interests them and to choose one for the science fair. Need help looking for ideas? Please see my delicious account: (www.delicious.com/msrobertson) and click on the tag "Science Fair." There are three sites to help your child choose a topic.

Please contact me at the school if you have any questions.

Book Club/ Independent Learning

I recently sent home a newsletter for you to read discussing our new literacy project we are starting. I then asked the students to bring back that letter and put it in their binder. Now that I am thinking about it, I should have had you initial that you have read it. oops! Teacher's make mistakes too! So I am going to send those newsletters back with your child, and can you please initial that you have read it! Thanks :)

So far, we have had two book club meetings and they have gone really well! Every student has come prepared with a connection that they have made to the book and have been practicing their fluency with a passage of their choice. The purpose of our book clubs is to discuss our learning. One of the students explained it as, "We will discover things that we may not have noticed if we were only reading it by ourselves." I thought that was really neat because that is what it is all about. To talk about our learning by asking questions and sharing our knowledge.

The students are responsible for the following things:

By Friday the students should have:

1. read the assigned chapters (4 chapters every week)

2. completed at least 15 Gift of Words

3. completed at least 3 comprehension questions "checking for your understanding"

4. written a powerful response using the connection they made from their reading

The students have an hour each day to be working on these things, so they should not have homework in this area, unless they want to bring their book home to be reading and making their connections.

This project is a work in progress but so far so good, because learning is happening!